How the Kanye West/Mellow Pages prank happened

Sunday night was a big night for Brooklyn’s second smallest (after this) library, Mellow Pages: according to an email that they’d received, Kanye West was going to show up to get some footage for a new video. Not completely outside the realm of possibility, since he had been at Brooklyn Fireproof recently. It turned out though, that his alleged appearance and the music video he shot was just a strange hoax perpetrated on the library. We spoke to co-founder Matt Nelson about it, and why they don’t really mind.

As has been mentioned elsewhere, the email that went out last Thursday said that Kanye West was going to come to Mellow Pages and shoot a video with lo-fi handheld cameras on Sunday. Anyone who showed up was instructed to tweet their hearts out about Kanye coming through, and he was going to show at 8. So, as tends to happen at Mellow Pages anyway, the room ended up being packed with around 50 young pretty people drinking cheap beer. So they waited and waited, flooded Twitter with #mellowyeezus tweets and…no Kanye.

“This is probably just a prank played on us by someone with basic/mid-level Google search capabilities,” Nelson told us over an email. He theorized it was a person who looked up the name of Kanye’s PR director and made an email address out of that. He also said that of course they regret people showing up expecting to see Kanye, but that there didn’t seem to be too many hard feelings, and “then we drank and drinking seems to fix most things.” While the experience was “super weird” in Nelson’s words, it’s not going to change the basic mission of Mellow Pages. “We still have books. We still have upcoming readings. Nothing’s different.” No word from them on what they thought of the new album though.